Cirrus@Austlit

'In the twenty-first century the combination of an architectural and a military career may seem unlikely, but in the less specialised world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was possible for one individual to combine seemingly disparate careers. Historically there are certainly precedents for the dual achievement of Joseph John Talbot Hobbs (1864–1938), for example that of the career of the even more multifarious English architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, who was not only a soldier and a distinguished architect, but an acclaimed playwright as well. While Talbot Hobbs was no Vanbrugh, he nevertheless carved out a significant career in Western Australia between 1887, when he arrived there from Britain, and the outbreak of the First World War. Hobbs’s military career did not begin with the onset of hostilities in 1914, but had run in parallel with his architectural work during the preceding decades. After only three years in Australia, Hobbs was a lieutenant in the Perth Artillery Volunteers, and in 1897 he was second in command of the Western Australian military contingent which travelled to Britain to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. ...'